In April, my husband, Mark, signed up for a Charlottesville Fire and Ice workshop where participants spend twenty minutes in a 215-degree sauna, then two to six minutes in an ice bath. Afterward, they did it again. Two more times.
Mark found it so transformative, he bought a ten-session package and invited me to join him.
I promised to try it at least once, but I kept stalling.
At first, my excuse was travel. Then I was tapering off a medication and didn’t want to stress my body further. But deep down, fear fueled my procrastination.
It wasn’t the cold. In 2000, I submerged myself in a forty-degree plunge pool in Ireland. Then in 2007, during Louisville’s annual Polar Bear Plunge, I jumped off a deck into the Ohio River on a day when the air was thirty-three degrees and the water thirty-six.
Online, the Fire and Ice photos showed mostly young, buff, and serious-looking people immersed in tubs of ice water.
My husband said entering the tub was easy. “All you do is lean back and dunk your head into the water as you tip your feet out of the tub.”
Every time he said this, I imagined this bendy, buff crew artfully leaning back as they slid themselves in while I fell back and cracked my skull.
Unable to picture my success, I froze.
Has this ever happened to you?
Writers often freeze when they don’t know how to get started, where their stories are going, or how to structure their work.
Sometimes, this looks like stalling or avoiding their writing desks. But at other times, our procrastination looks productive. Think about the times you rewrote and rewrote an opening passage or key scene, hoping perfection would help you see the way forward.
In What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, Prentis Hemphill says, “Visioning is an uncovering of potential. It’s revealing what is already there and trying to become, if only we believe it.”
Often it takes tools and a structured process to imagine your success.
In writing, these tools include prompts that crack our stories open, instruments like beat sheets, synopses, and backward outlines that help us systematically organize our ideas, encouragement that we’re on the right track, and a community growing alongside us.
We must also identify the fears blinding us to our potential. In memoir, these can include internal beliefs about who we are and messages we’ve been told about speaking our truths or how our successes impact others.
When it came to the cold plunge, years of illness, and a family legacy of breaking down, suggested I wasn’t strong enough to do this.
But a healed part of me wanted to challenge this belief. So, I finally set the date and some parameters.
I insisted Mark demonstrate safe ways to enter the tub.
I chose not to dunk my head.
I permitted myself to leave immediately if my body said no more.
Once a vision has been set, you must commit to it. As Prentis says, “Commitment is the path between your vision and this moment… Commitment is what gets us through the middle of change when the outcome seems bleak, when it seems we’re lost, and we can’t go any further.”
The road from idea to publication is long and winding for most writers. Sometimes we make huge strides only to face setbacks in our stories or rejections that challenge our self-worth. But in joyful commitment, we imagine our success, because “underneath our current reality is a future waiting to be conjured.”
During my Fire and Ice session, I discovered that all I had to do was step into the tub and sit down. I successfully completed three rounds, which were far easier than I’d anticipated. While I don’t plan to do it again, at least this fall, the experience showed me how much I’d healed and sparked excitement about the road ahead.
For many of us, September is the second new year and a time when we recommit to our goals and projects.
I hope you’ll spend a few minutes imagining the life you’d like to lead during the last four months of 2024. Use these questions to envision your success:
- What area of your life do you want to commit or recommit to?
- What does success look like? Build an imagine in your head throughout the fall, rehearse it.
- What do you want to begin or initiate? (Think of specific goals, projects, or activities.)
- What blessings in this area do you want to call in?
- What will success look like? Build a picture and throughout the fall, envision it.
Until next week, may the visions you set ignite your creativity and motivate you to write on.
Love what you just read?
Get my weekly posts delivered to your inbox. As a special bonus, I’ll send you a FREE copy of my ebook, Write More, Fret Less: The Toolkit for Gaslight Proofing Your Writing Life.
Need a little nudge? See what my followers have to say.
I get something from every single newsletter I receive.
I have a short list of newsletters I regularly read. Lisa’s is one of them. I read every single one.
Your newsletters offer excellent reminders to check in with myself and understand my needs as a writer.
